Multimedia Art and Design

Working Well with Others

I’m working on designing a product with some friends of mine. We might end up starting a company and actually producing it for the masses. So, I can’t really post much about the design process, lest I reveal all of our delicious details about the product. But, I can certainly say how humbling it is. How scary it is, and how it makes me feel as a designer.

I went into the project thinking I was going to be “the designer” but one of my friends is a budding creative. She wants to do some of it, too. How can I work with someone that hasn’t spent a year being torn apart by design teachers?

We are currently using dropbox to cloud-store our files. I put screenshots in there of what I’ve been doing. She asked me to put the native files in the drop box, too.

In my classes, I’ve been taught that when you give the client editable files, you lose control. They start to make horrendous changes to the style that you lovingly molded. They move things around and when it comes back to you, you’re left with a frankenstein baby. And I didn’t want to feel that way. I asked my other collaborator if it was wrong to want to keep the files and have people just tell me what to do, but he said that people are visual and it’s easier to play around with the layout instead of verbally communicating it. He said that if I started holding back now that it would not be helpful as part of a team and moving forward.

Screenshot of named layers in Photoshop

I want to support the team, the company, the product in the way that I know how: graphic design. It is with the spirit of support that I organized the files so that they all can tinker with it (by “organize” I mean grouping layers and naming them clearly). Together we can build something better than separately, but I am bracing myself. I’m trying to divorce myself from my designs and look at them as the team’s assets.

I put an instructions document that we can all edit so that we can be clear on why I used the software programs that I did. (I don’t want to layout the whole thing in Adobe Illustrator) and when we make changes, we can document them there. I think that’s a start.